


The Invisible Language

by Anonymous_As_Myself



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: A little angst, A little bit of platonic logicality, ADHD Roman, Aspergers, Autistic Character, Autistic Logan, Emile Picani (mentioned), Especially for precocious aspies used to homeschooling, Human AU, I am not sorry for this, I wrote this in 2 sittings, Internal monologue fic, It Gets Better, Literally 2 lines of dialogue in this, Logan does his best, Logan has supportive friends, Many metaphors, Middle school is shitty guys, Pretty much my life with a Sanders Sides skin over it, Sensory Overload, Totally a vent fic, mentions of schoolyard violence, some fluffs, the summary is terrible ok I know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-15 04:54:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15405420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymous_As_Myself/pseuds/Anonymous_As_Myself
Summary: Logan Sanders has always had..difficulties. With people. Always. He thought he was just 'the introverted awkward nerd' but..the label was always a bit off.It took too many incidents to find out why. Now that he does know..Well, it's a bit hard to wrap his head around.





	The Invisible Language

**Author's Note:**

> (This is a vent fic. I was struggling with having to dump a friend and it got me dwelling on my social struggles..and so I tried my hand at actually writing a fic to project all my problems through! XD)
> 
> (For anyone who doesn’t know, I have autism-Aspergers specifically, and I totally 100% headcanon Logan as an aspie. He's an aspie in everything I write even if it's not specific. So..for those of you who also stan autistuc Logan (and maybe a bit of ADHD Roman) here is this, me basically throwing my entire life story on our poor nerd and I am so sorry but also not XD. Also, the book I mentioned is very real, and I actually own it. It’s really useful, if a bit dated and heteronormative)
> 
> Warnings: Descriptions of sensory overload (similar to a panic attack) social struggles, very brief mention of selfharm, mentions of fistfights and minor physical violence.

It was all just so complicated now.

Or rather, now he knew how complicated it was.

Before, Logan had always just thought he was bad with people. That was fine. It fit, with his habit of staying inside with his nose in a book. The socially awkward, introverted nerd who wasn’t good with kids.

It was simple.

But that’s the thing. Life isn’t simple. And neither was Logan. Even as a six year old.

The socially awkward, introverted nerd, from what he’d seen on tv, would have cried or just silently tried to make due when another kid ‘accidentally’ spilled tomato juice all over his copy of  _ Alice in Wonderland _ . Logan Sanders leapt from his desk, grabbed the kid’s wrist, and yanked him down so his head smashed into the wood.

The socially awkward one was laughed at. Logan was sent to the office.

Time and time again this would happen. Until he turned eight, and his parents pulled him out of school. He was homeschooled after that, and it was simultaneously like a breath of fresh air and entering a stifling hot room. He was free of the children, free to discover on his own, but he found himself itching for more, to ask questions about things his parents could answer, to do projects he’d heard about online but often ended up screaming in his attempts to recreate them because it wasn’t  _ explained _ ,  _ why this, why that, how do I do that, it doesn’t make sense!! _

Homeschooling was a blessing and a curse. He made do. He did well in fact, almost all of his online courses were marked complete with a neat 100 for the score. It was enough for them, but not for him.  Eight year old Logan hated it. Ten year old Logan was used to it. 

Eleven year old Logan dug his heels into it.

Middle school. His parents wanted to send him back. He understood their reasoning, the rational half of his brain did. Middle school was a big change, adolescence, and the middle ground before high school, which he always knew he would be going to-you can’t get college credit from online courses and library books after all, not the ones he was using. It would give him time to prepare. And yet he was a creature of habit, so used to his solitary life..

Logan has no choice however.

On the first day he stepped inside, armed with only the knowledge of American Girl books he’d skimmed through (who cared if they were meant for girls, they didn’t write helpful guides for boys!) and distant memories of elementary school. The first weeks went by as a blur, and Logan ate it up. The assignments, the grades, the smirk he always found himself wearing when he placed his assignments in the basket. That triumph didn’t even compare to the rush of pride and satisfaction he felt when the teacher told the class that he test they’d been given was apparently too hard, many kids failed and only one student actually got a perfect score, and his paper was handed back with a 100 written on the top.

He’d be lying if he said he didn’t hold the paper up a bit and catch the eyes of the numerous people who stared at him with no surprise in their eyes.

Logan even found friends in those first few weeks. A darkly dressed kid who, much like him, never really knew where to go during paired projects and ended up working with him. He found that Virgil was actually very bright, a relief when he looked around the room to see people talking and not doing anything useful. The pale boy was quiet, but listened as Logan chattered away about his  plans for the assignment.

Patton was next, a round-faced boy who seemed to share at least a few words with everyone he saw. Logan didn’t mind that. He wasn’t a lazy student, maybe a bit easily distracted, but when he was sat next to Logan in science his work quality was always at least a solid B, as long as he was shushed every now and again. He seemed better with people too, and Logan found himself enjoying his company.

Then there was Roman. He was introduced to their little trio by Patton, who apparently shared a drama class with the tanned boy. He was..a handful. And yet Logan found himself challenged by him. Their friendship was an unusual one, full of debates that more often than not ended in yelling, but at least they started off with intelligent points and interesting ideas-and if often Patton had to break off their passion so neither of them landed with lunch detention, well that was the price to pay.

He was enjoying himself here.

Then the second month. Logan remembered where he was when a redheaded girl told him he was wrong in that ‘you’re a moron’ tone when he told her that actually, the word for the study of space was astronomy, not astrology. When a boy in a green sweater had blatantly ignored him when he asked him to stop scooting his chair across the hard floors. When an entire group of people had continued to call him Logie even though he’d told them over and over he hated it. Many of them seemed to do it just  _ because  _ it annoyed him. This went on. Every day another simpleton would disrespect him. Every day he’d tell him to stop. Often he’d snap at them, or swear. That always got him snickers in return. And Logan found himself clenching his fists as his whole body burned red hot.

It happened again a week after this started. A boy with a Minecraft t-shirt cut him off in the lunch line, and when Logan told him to go to the end, the boy only scoffed and responded with “Are you in kindergarten?” in a tone that made his blood boil with how fucking  _ snotty  _ it was.

Logan’s hand was fisted in the back of that obnoxious t-shirt and pulling back with all its might before he could think.

The boy ended up on the floor crying, and Logan ended up suspended.

There were more incidents that year. Mostly yelling or swearing, but minor physical violence was not unheard of. It was common even.

Logan didn’t want that. He wanted to be cool, to drop the bullies and idiots with bullets of intelligence from his tongue, but everything he tried a witty comeback they’d give him either confused looks, no acknowledgement as all, or retort with ‘Your mom’ jokes, a sort of ‘insult’ that required barely a single brain cell to perform.

They never listened. They were stupid, childish, disrespectful. Logan stuck only to his three friends and the many teachers he’d grown quite friendly with, They liked him after all, he was precocious and that was something teachers always found fun. with adults, he also found he could make himself actually heard, his theories, ideas, suggestions, it was a glorious freedom he had previously only had with Patton, Roman, and Virgil.

But things didn’t get that much better.

In fact, in seventh grade Logan found his outbursts getting worse. They were farther and fewer between, but the eventual rage that would explode was far worse than before. It was like the dam that held back his rage had grown stronger, but that meant it took more water to barrel it over, and that sent far more devastating floods down the peaceful valley of his mind.

In eighth grade, he got into a fistfight with a boy who had called Roman gay as an insult, not knowing that it was true or that the word should not be used in such a manner. When the boy refused to listen to Logan’s explanation of what the word meant and instead switched tracks to scoffing every time he said it was a normal and perfectly acceptable, beautiful thing. And by the time the midget of a bigot tossed in the dreaded f-slur Logan’s mind was so crimson he only felt a rush of relief when his fist connected with the boy’s head.

 

It was two weeks of suspension for that. And it was during that time that Logan’s mother revealed something to him that he had never expected. 

Tales of his childhood-or babyhood rather, where he had exhibited strange behaviors no other parent seemed to have seems.

“I think you might have Aspergers,” she had said.

And now, here he was. He couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to tell him of her suspicions. But now Logan was sitting on his bed, the blanket covered with constellations, staring at the cover of a book.

It was a familiar scene.

But this wasn’t a book chosen by Logan’s own hand, or by the school, or even a recommendation from his parents or a loan from his younger sister Abby. 

It had been gifted to him by the man at the Autism Center.

_ The Asperkid’s Secret Guide to Social Rules. _

He’d read the whole thing.

Before, he’d thought he was just awkward. 

But no. Of course it couldn’t be that simple. It wasn’t that he just didn’t know what to say. He was missing an entire way of communicating that people his mind now knew as ‘neurotypicals’ spoke in without realizing it.

The invisible language. Body language, facial expressions, tone, he knew that all existed yes..but he’d never seen it. At least not in the subtleties the book described. And all these double meanings of phrases? So the dark-skinned girl who had asked him what he was reading during math class  _ didn’t  _ want to just read the back and learn about Sherlock Holmes’ latest mystery? She’d wanted to get to know him? 

Why didn’t she just say so!

It was so much more complicated now. The vague, yet simple term of ‘weird’ was replaced by the vast, yet specific, confusing, and multifaceted word that was  _ autistic. _ A word he’d never have expected to apply to him. Mental health went really a subject he’d looked into, feelings were too wound into it.. and feelings had always been his greatest vice. 

So now, with that book in his hand, he thought. 

There was a whole other world he couldn’t see..that’s what he had been missing all this time? was the specific shifts in tone in posture people made-what he’d always thought to be absently-something his parents expected him to understand and  _ that _ was why he always seemed to have to be elbowed when running his mouth?

It was like….like telepathy. Yes, to Logan, the cues he now found himself putting extra effort into finding; his sister’s slightly hunched shoulders at the dinner table, his dad’s slightly turned up nose when he mentioned his history teacher, were a sort of telepathy that the ‘normal’ population all shared.    
But it wasn’t as if it was that simple. Of course, it was tauntingly,  _ agonizingly  _ complicated. You see, these people were all telepaths, sharing cues in an invisible tongue-and yet, none of them knew they were telepathic. And yet still, they all expected everyone else to be.

So that was why he was strange. Logan had looked up how much of communication was non-verbal - he felt his eyes go wide when he saw the percentage dedicated to ‘body language’.   
Fifty-eight percent.

_ Fifty-eight percent. _

What else could he have missed?

Logan was both happy and uncomfortable with the diagnosis. He now knew terms, words, blessed  _ reasons _ for his little ticks, why he felt like something was terribly wrong for at least an hour just because he’d had to take an alternate route to school (routine disruption), why was such a picky eater (finickiness caused by sensitivity to textures and certain flavors/smells), why people always responded with confusion whenever they saw him pepper the science teacher with question after question, challenge after challenge like he was trying to understand how the universe wove itself in the span of five minutes, and looked surprised when Roman asked him if he knew why Patton was being quiet. Logan had responded with a simple no, informing the other that Patton hadn’t told him-and when the slightly taller boy had suggested that he ask, Logan realized the thought had never occurred to him.

 

Most importantly, it explained what Roman had dubbed ‘The Fitness Fiasco’. To sum it up, Logan had thought of a new game for their groups to play in gym class—something  _ besides  _ basketball for once in their lives, and yet as he tried to explain, the girl who seemed to have taken charge of the group he was trying to explain the idea  _ to  _ kept talking over him,  _ ignoring him, _ challenging what he said—and the noise. The noise, how all the chattering and the sound of balls bouncing on the floor, the rage he felt at being slighted in this way, how it had attacked him. How he’d suddenly found himself tensing, wanting to run or to yell, unsure which, how the sound turned solid and pressed in-his muscles going taut, his hands twitching with every word from the students mouths,  how his arm violently jerked away as Patton tried to comfort him-   
And then the scream. He’d screamed at the top of his lungs for  _ quiet, _ falling to the ground and sobbing in the fetal position—eyes screwed shut behind his glasses and hands clamped tight to his ears, unsure of what was even falling from his mouth aside from the fact that he was begging,  _ begging _ for silence. It had only quieted a bit as people turned to stare, and then he’d felt hands on his shoulders, ones he jerked away from—but no one knew what to do. Virgil’s low whispers for him to breathe, to use the 4-7-8 method that the emo always used to calm his own panic attacks, was only met with more incoherent begging for silence.    
It had been Patton who rescued him, who brought the teacher over and ended up guiding the sobbing Logan to an empty classroom.    
There he had been met with silence. There he felt his terrified bawling turn to weeping with relief. In the silence, he’d recovered, his muscles lost the tension, and he allowed the freckled boy to wrap him in a hug.

 

He’d only been able to call it a panic attack before. But now he knew the term. Sensory overload, brought on my the noise and the stress.

It had been a relief just to know that. To know that in moments when he stood among too many people, feeling his muscles clench as their shoulders brushed his, that his hands should not go out to push them away, but to his ears, to block out the trigger.

It became a cue, when debates with Roman got heated—they were friends after all, if rivals as well, and it was understood that if Logan’s jaw suddenly clenched and his hands went up to cover his ears, they had to pause for at least a minute. 

But of course, knowing where the holes in his social skills were led to Logan overcompensating, and it didn’t..always feel natural. He found himself staring at people, trying to read their faces, for a little too long on many an occasion, or overreacting to something because he’d overanalyzed the tone. He found himself having to bite his tongue on many an occasion to keep himself from simply  _ explaining  _ why he did what he did to his parents, who would only take it as making excuses.

It was a balance of the good, the bad, and the ugly. He understood now that his all-or-nothing attitude was why he found himself simply not doing projects if he couldn’t grasp the material—and this led to him having to more often than not, swallow his pride and ask for help when he was getting frustrated. Yet the same black-and-white philosophy got him gasps of shock from Roman when he explained that, in the story Roman had been iterating to him, the whole second half of the plot could have been avoided if Leealli had simply decapitated Sorcerer Kai while they were trapped in her dungeon. Roman had protested, saying it would make her just as terrible as they, but Logan had frowned, explaining that yes, the act was cruel, but if a single act of evil by her direct hand was all it took to stop countless others by her indirect hand, wasn’t it worth it?

But he had also been the one to convince Patton not to remain friends with Oliver, when one day, sitting on the cotton candy clouds that patterned Patton’s quilt, the smaller boy had confided in him that Oliver had vented about his habits of self-harm to the kind soul for three hours the night previous, yet refused any help Patton gave, shot down any attempt at saying he was worth more than he thought.

It was Logan who had took Patton’s hand and told him that people like that could only be helped by themselves and a therapist, that he should not take it upon himself to bear others’ problems in that way. Who had given him a hesitant hug and told him that  _ his  _ mental health was just as important as theirs.

His friends were his lifeline. Maybe they tripped him up—well, they definitely did, yet as much as he found himself apologizing to Virgil for seeming angry when he was simply tired and being a bit blunter and more insensitive with his words than usual (not that he usually was tactful or sensitive when it came to criticism, even constructive criticism) he found himself sighing in relief as the anxious boy shared with him his own experiences in worrying about the negative undertones in the words of others too much to be considered healthy. They would sit and talk about it, the same experience for two different reasons, one of them due to the irrational fear of people disliking him or being angry, and the other due to worrying he was doing something incorrectly that he was not aware of, failing to pick up on a crucial piece of information.

As much as Logan found himself and Roman butting heads, even shouting at each other during friendly debates gone sour, name-calling and snapping fault after fault, he reflected fondly on the time he had been ecstatic to discover that Roman’s own ADHD-riddled brain hyperfixated on Disney just as his own did on Sherlock, and they would both go on for hours about their obsessions while sadly recalling how old interests had faded.

#####  As much as he often found himself hurting Patton unintentionally, and even worse, learning that Patton had been hiding that fact from him for weeks as to spare his feelings, as difficult as it was to convince (well, more plead with) Patton to tell him these things, as he wouldn’t be offended much and he had no other way of knowing what he was doing wrong, he found himself sitting by his side, all attention completely fixated on what to him were mindblowing truths about people and yet seemed common, boring knowledge to Patton, as the freckled boy explained cues and rules, that invisible language Logan did not speak.

Those friends stuck by him, even though others did not. With all the walls Logan had built up around his emotions, to protect himself and others, few could breach the fortifications—except for those who had already been on the inside as he built them.   
And he was fine with that.

Going to a therapist was...awkward at first, but it helped. Mr. Picani understood his aversion to talking of his feelings, and instead cleverly tricked him every time, asking questions about events until Logan was off on an angry rant. With that expelled, they’d talk through possible solutions.

 

He kept the book. And most of the other books he was given on the topic, eager to learn and understand more things about himself, knowing the reasons behind behaviors, quirks in things had always been one of his favorite things, and now he found it was possible in people.   
  


As Logan worked through his discovery during the last semester of eighth grade and through that summer, with Virgil, Patton, Roman, his parents, Mr. Picani, and occasionally even his rainbow-haired little sister, he found his mind shifting. He was truly calm now more often than not, able to express his rationale...well, rationally, rather than through insults. His debates grew calmer, and while he certainly had his slip-ups..he was improving. Slowly. Steadily.

His viewpoint of the world was unusual, like an outsider, and while that could be isolating, if he explained it well, people were often interested to hear it. It was different, his own; the metaphor Logan found himself using was that everyone else was a Macintosh computer, and he and his fellow spectrumites were PCs, capable of all the same things, though in ways the world was not wired to accommodate. Also, clearly superior in many a way.

His core programming was different, even if his exterior seemed the same, and Logan was okay with that. He’d never know the invisible language, not as a native would, but he could learn it—the same way he learned slang, through help, a lot of online research, his friends, and some study notes here and there.

It was complicated, they way he figured things out, the systems he’d devised. But complicated problems would never be solved with simple solutions.

And he still had plenty of time left to learn.


End file.
